Site-specificity has been the main focus of my work as an artist and academic researcher. Since 1997 I have worked sitespecifically, expanding the notion of site to include its audience, history, discursive aspects and, more recently, food. I have translated and published articles on the subject and worked on the translation into Portuguese of the expression 'site-specific' itself, taking it as an anglophone that isn't selfcontained and should be translated when travels, just like siteoriented art. Strangely enough, the expression is part of the international art scene and is seldom, if ever, translated into other languages, cultures and histories. The main issue with the word's untranslatability goes against the very concept implied by it: site determines meaning. Translating is thus seen as a critical reading of the concept and expression, claiming back its criticality.
One of the most intense ways of relating to site is eating. Our eating habits and taste determine what will be produced by the land and thus shape the landscape. Such interrelation has been kept in the dark, as food has been disconnected from territory and supermarkets have become our suppliers. We lost track of the lands where what we eat comes from and the complexities involved in its production. Food has become an autonomous good, highly undetermined by the site where we live in. Out of more than 12.5 thousand species of edible plants in the planet (Günther Kunkel in "Plants for Human Consumption"), only 12 are responsible for 75% of our food intake, most originally from Europe and Asia (FAO). A process that renders thousands of species invisible as a food choice, many perceived as mere weed. Globalized and homogenized, our eating patterns have been flattening the planet's diversity, with huge impact on environment. Politicizing taste and our eating habits has become a major necessity nowadays in order to increase diversity, decrease the impact on environment, improve health, decommodify food, reconnect to site and intensify our sense of belongingness to a place. Promoting visibility over the complexities of the digestive system — which should expand to include not only mouth to anus, but land use and every cell of our bodies — is urgent. Relating site-specificity to food production, I was able to find rich material in the literature on agroecology and specially on agroforestry, which proposes a revolutionary attitude towards cultivation of the land, based on a keen observation of how indigenous peoples produced food. This way of thinking, the methodology of "listening to a site" is verifiable both in the arts and agroforestry. That was the focus of my postdoctoral research in the Arts Department at the University of the State of Santa Catarina (UDESC): site-specific art and agroecology. This discussion is also part of my research group at the University of the State of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), where I hold the position of Tenured Professor since April, 2015, in the Department of Visual Arts.
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jorgemennabarreto@gmail.com